Room at the Inn (Novella): A Loveswept Contemporary Romance by Knox Ruthie

Author:Knox, Ruthie [Knox, Ruthie]
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
ISBN: 9780345544353
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2013-11-03T18:30:00+00:00

Chapter Eight

It was the kind of high that lasted. Carson figured the staying power of this particular Julie high probably had something to do with the fact that they were always postcoital, midcoital, or precoital. Basically, his entire life now boiled down to sex, foreplay, and sleeping. Not necessarily in that order.

He walked around town with a smug expression on his face—he’d caught it in a shop window, the answer to the hitherto perplexing riddle of why everyone seemed to be smiling at him. Strangers on the street. Uncle Bruce at the hardware store. Even his father, once, briefly, and possibly by accident.

They were smiling at him because he looked happy.

He thought nobody had the power to bring him down from it. Then he ran into Leo at the diner.

Carson was minding his own business, drinking coffee and looking at a pamphlet about gold-leaf restoration he’d tracked down on eBay. The Potter Falls bank, a squat marble structure with a gilded dome, needed a facelift, and he had some notion of figuring out what needed to be done with the dome and … well, he didn’t know what. It wasn’t a job that could be dealt with in the winter. He could leave the pamphlet with Julie, though, if it came to that, and ask her to pass the info along to the historical society ladies.

Leo plucked the pamphlet out of Carson’s hand and studied the title page as he took a seat across the booth. “Little light reading?”

“What do you want?”

“My key back, for starters.”

Carson fished his key ring out of his pocket and started unthreading the loaned key to the shoe-factory building.

“Here you go.”

Leo took the key. The waiter set Carson’s plate on the tabletop. Grilled cheese and fries that no longer looked all that appetizing.

“You’ve been over there a few times.”

He’d been in there twice more. There was something sacred about what came over him in that place. A weight that he ached for—a trust or an anchor, or possibly both.

“I just poked around.”

“Have you talked to Julie about it?”

Carson looked down at his hand wrapped around the mug. He hadn’t. If he told her, she’d hear something different from what he was saying. She would get her hopes up.

Or maybe she wouldn’t. She wasn’t the same girl he’d left here all those years ago. She had her own life, and she knew the score as well as he did.

“I think you should,” Leo said.

“Yeah, well, no offense, but who asked you?”

Leo sort of smiled and shook his head. He leaned back against the booth, his legs widespread, his open face disarmed in a way that made Carson uncomfortable. “Do you even remember why you hate me?”

“I don’t hate you.”

“Don’t bullshit a bullshitter. I’m curious. Do you remember?”

“ ’Course I remember.”

He hated Leo because they’d been best friends. From somewhere in the mists of time around second grade all the way through to their sophomore year in high school, Leo was always over at the house, eating Mom’s cookies, playing Legos, watching TV, and doing homework with him.

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